Table of Contents

Overview

An Availability Set is a high level construct that captures both fault domain and update domain. The virtual machines have been "tagged" with the same availability set and are guaranteed to be in different fault and update domains. This is the construct that gets used directly from their management ports as well as the APIs. Fault domain and update domain are secondary constructs that are used indirectly through availability sets.

For more information on Availability Sets and configuring them in the Azure Portal, see Managing the Availability of Virtual Machines. For information on creating Availability Sets in the RightScale Dashboard, see the Steps below.

Hosted Service and Cloud Service

A group of VMs or Roles that are grouped together for a particular application. Typically, all VMs and Roles within a Cloud Service can talk to each other over private network and can be load balanced.

Support for Microsoft Azure Availability Sets

In the RightScale Dashboard, you may select an Availability Set from the Advanced Options during the Add Server flow. You have the option of creating a new availability set as well. You may assign servers to different Availability Sets even while they are in the same Azure cloud service. When cloning deployments, all the servers in a given deployment will end up in a different cloud service as well.

SSH and RDP functionality - This is now supported for VMs that are in an availability set (i.e. under the same Cloud Service)

Port forwarding rules and endpoints - This feature allows port forwarding to be setup for VMs behind a load balancer endpoint. This works in conjunction with SSH and RDP.

Steps

Navigate to Manage > Servers > New Server

Select an Azure region and a deployment.

Select a ServerTemplate.

In the Server Details tab, click "Advanced Options"

Select an existing Availability Set from the dropdown or create a new one. Your Availability Set name must be between 3-15 alphanumeric characters.

Launch the server.

After the server is operational, you can view the server's Availability Set in the Info tab. Availability Sets are region-specific. Once all the servers (VMs) are removed from an Availability Set, the Availability Set is removed.